Twig

by wildbow

  “There would have been something just in Mauer finally getting his win.”

  “It would have been a waste, Sylvester. I think you know that,” Fray said.

  I know.

  I nodded.

  Hayle had yet to speak. That was fitting, given the god he represented.

  “I always feel so glad to see you all,” Fray said. “Less so when you arrange to have me chased down, but I get by. I’m fond of you all.”

  “Sy says it’s because you made them,” Mary said.

  “That’s not what I said, exactly,” I said.

  Fray smiled, red lips parting to reveal just a bit of her teeth. She looked at me. “What did you say, exactly?”

  “I’m the wrong person to ask if you want exact recollection,” I said. “But… I said we were your project.”

  Fray smiled again. She looked down at Hayle, who sat to her left, then back at us. “You were.”

  The rain drummed against one side of the tower.

  “I can’t say I expected it to go this way,” she said. “But that’s you, isn’t it, Sylvester? Unexpected.”

  Hayle finally spoke, his voice far older than I remembered it, which I didn’t, really. “I wish you hadn’t destroyed my Academy.”

  The other Lambs were watching the exchange, tense. They were as tense about what I was going to say as they were about anything.

  “Did Helen, Jessie, or Duncan make it?” Fray asked.

  “Helen’s there,” Lillian said, indicating the parcel in Ashton’s lap. “Duncan and Jessie are in the lab downstairs.”

  “An uphill battle, I imagine,” Fray said.

  “You imagine right,” Lillian said.

  “What a shame about Helen. She was a work of art.”

  “She will be again,” I said. “We have Ibbot. And, you know, we have pretty much everything else, this side of the King’s Ocean.”

  Gunshots sounded elsewhere in the city. Mary craned her head to look, perhaps in hopes of seeing who was shooting, and in what directions. She eased back down. She had a knife in her hands, where she hadn’t before.

  “Well, I suppose Helen’s current situation simplifies the desserts I might serve with tea, then. It was why I asked as to her whereabouts. Who am I serving?” Fray asked. “I recall you turned down my invitation, the last time we talked, Sylvester.”

  “No tea,” I said.

  Mary and Lillian refused.

  “I’ll have tea,” Ashton said. Mary gave him a stern look. He changed his mind, saying, “I won’t have tea.”

  Genevieve Fray served herself and Hayle. She opened a tin and put a biscuit on each saucer with the cups.

  “That’s not poison, is it?” I asked. “I think we deserve more than you two offing yourselves.”

  “No,” Fray said. “I wouldn’t do that to you Lambs.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say ‘my Lambs’?” I asked.

  “It could be. I’d be worried that Mary might kill me, with that look in her eyes.”

  “Don’t kill her, Mary,” I said. I watched the knife disappear, then drew in a deep breath and sighed.

  “I wouldn’t call you mine,” Fray said. “Whatever part I might have played. You are your own individuals. As a case in point, your war was rather more messy than I’d have done, Hayle’s Academy in ruins and all.”

  “And the deaths,” Lillian said.

  “Of course.”

  “I think you’re going to have to explain sooner than later,” Mary said. “One of you. And I do hate that I’m talking about a plural ‘you’ with Sylvester and Fray included.”

  Lillian didn’t look very happy about it either.

  “I don’t know how it started,” I said.

  “Hayle set the class a project,” Fray said.

  “I’d like to hear it from him,” I said. “At least to start.”

  “I had a good crop of students,” Hayle said. “I wanted to challenge them, and I wanted to be challenged. I set them the task of creating a better brain, or repurposing old projects to include one. It was something I’d done before, but I pushed it, even though it was something the Academy didn’t encourage or reward. In terms of advancement and funding, it was often a dead end. Genevieve Fray was my student, then.”

  “I went looking for a way to approach my project. My journey took me to the Block, but not to the… full extent of the Block,” Fray said.

  “They know,” I said. I glanced over my shoulder at the Treasurer and Gordeux.

  She gave them a searching look, then said, “I figured a large part of things out. The copious amount of study drugs I was taking might have helped. That I started from a child slave bought at auction and sought to make an experiment that would complement the Nobles… well. Not a far cry.”

  I bit my tongue.

  “My project was Evette,” she said.

  I’d wondered. I nodded to myself.

  “Evette failed,” Lillian said.

  “She did. I was overly ambitious, but some of it had to do with luck. Had she succeeded, I don’t know what would have happened. I took care to erase my background as team lead once we decided on a future course of action.”

  Hayle joined in once more, “I called her to my office to speak about the failure. We found our way to the subject of the block, as she explained why she’d been so ambitious. Had she been anything but a favorite student, a circumspect one, and me a favorite, teacher of hers, both circumspect and harboring a desire for a greater challenge that he couldn’t articulate, one of us would have likely met our end after that talk.”

  “But you didn’t,” Mary said.

  “Unless you’re Stitched,” Ashton said.

  “We raised the subject of the Lambs, a larger project with an ultimate end goal. The Academy was complacent. The Crown is stagnant, and it’s a stagnation that’s doing a great deal of harm. They’re content to bury continents and uncover them again after a century or more. They trust that any problem that arises is one they can solve,” Hayle said.

  “When you say you wanted a challenge, you mean you wanted to raise one. Literally raise us,” I said.

  “In effect,” Hayle said. “We adjusted the experiment, we created the idea of the Lambs as a gestalt of the best projects. We turned down Percy, because Percy’s idea, while good in its own right, was very much what we didn’t want.”

  “Ironic,” I said. “That Mary’s here now.”

  “What—” Lillian started. “What exactly did you want? What aren’t you saying?”

  Fray smiled, and looked at me.

  “I suppose I have to ask. How did we do?” I asked.

  “You did just fine,” she said. “We’ll have to see how Jessie does, and if Helen can be restored, but I would venture to say you did perfect, getting as far as you did.”

  “All according to plan.”

  “Not even close to the original plan. I’d initially hoped you would accept one of my invitations. That I could guide you, nudge you. We tried to separate you when you started to run into problems, and our attempt to keep things manageable backfired. The, ah, crises I manufactured to pave the way and provide you something of an education got out of hand.”

  “Mauer,” I said.

  Fray smiled.

  “Providence,” Hayle said. “That you would walk your own path and—”

  “We ended up right where you wanted us,” I finished his sentence. I looked at the other Lambs. “Poised to become Nobles in our own right.”

  “Nobles?” Lillian asked.

  I could see the alarm on her face. The concern on Mary’s.

  “Poised,” Hayle said, and he leaned forward, elbows on the desk. I imagined he was seeing over a decade of work come to fruition in this. “But are you willing?”

  “Yes,” the voice said.

  Previous Next

  Crown of Thorns—20.18

  “I think you’d better explain,” Mary said.

  “We become Nobles. The plan at the start would ha
ve been to prop us up. Offer us up as a more battle-tested, flexible, dangerous sort of Noble. The kind that could trounce rebellions, that could use small amounts of power to do great things, best monsters, and test even the greatest minds. Better yet, we coordinate like no nobles taken separately could. We work together on an instinctive level.”

  “The Twins worked together,” Mary said.

  “The Twins failed. The Twins were relegated to bastarddom. I think they craved that natural cooperation. Something was missing. We strike that note.”

  I looked to Hayle for confirmation.

  He didn’t respond. He sat at his desk, arms folded before him. He looked very old and very tired.

  I nodded. “Knowing Hayle and Fray, they left both options open. The Lambs who survive are poised as great weapons, massive inconveniences to the Crown and Academy. We and the Crown get an offer. Lambs become Lords and Ladies, we become an asset instead of an inconvenience. We get everything we want, we get power like we’ve never had it, and Hayle gets to leverage the one thing he has over us.”

  “The expiration dates,” Lillian said.

  I walked around the desk. “The expiration dates. He removes the gun that’s been held to our heads since we were small. That, or he hands it over to the Academy, so they can control us.”

  “To what ends?” Lillian asked. “What’s the end goal?”

  I looked back over my shoulder at the old Professor.

  He was silent.

  “Things have been untenable for a long time,” Fray said, from the opposite end of the desk as me, supplying the answer. “There was a balance once. Wollstone was the start. I personally suspect he was mythologized, the extent of his deeds and knowledge exaggerated to the Academy’s benefit, but all the same, his work was discovered and made known to the nobility. What formed was a partnership. Government and the Academy apparatus, enmeshed. Over and over again, that pairing is hammered in, so that one is rarely mentioned without the other.”

  “At some point the Block became an essential part of things,” Lillian said.

  “Yes,” Fray said. Cynthia was behind her. “I imagine that is when the balance shifted.”

  “This is where I get a little stuck,” I paused as I walked around behind Mary, Ashton, and Lillian. “It’s where Hayle is sitting there, remaining quiet. He’s confirmed the main thrust of what he’s doing, but the god lurks there, ominous. It’s where you’re there, Fray, and I’m aware of the bits and pieces that you’ve threaded through everything. Bigger and more devastating than the rebel groups you propped up. You were up to something else. You had a greater plan at work, and I don’t know if it was a greater part of what you’re putting toward the Lambs to Lords gambit, or if it was a fallback. That’s the other god.”

  “Gods?” Fray asked.

  “On each of our prior visits, you were careful to ask me about my beliefs. What did I want, what did I believe in? What would prompt me to take the great leap of faith, if and when it counted? What was I here to do?”

  “I did. I wanted to know what kind of Lord you might be, given the chance, Sylvester,” she said.

  “Did I ever give you an answer?”

  “You gave me several. I worry you’re giving me another, with this talk of gods.”

  “It’s Sylvester’s metaphor,” Lillian said. “For the great, abstract, hard-to-comprehend forces you two represent, that could still ruin us. The Infante was the first. Sylvester named that god Power.”

  “And Power is conquered. Securely in your hands,” Fray said. “I see, now.”

  I smiled.

  “Let me think, then. Control… you already have control. You had it once you co-opted the lesser Academies and aristocrats. Based on the thrust of Sylvester’s statement, I’m… the plot? Intrigue? Machinations?”

  “Conspiracy,” Mary said.

  “That would suffice. Yes. It was absolutely my job to keep pieces in play, remove others, strike a balance, distract, and now I’m here.”

  “With cards up your sleeve.”

  “Do you think I have cards up my sleeve, Sylvester?”

  “The dissemination of Academy knowledge, the creation of primordials, the fact you were working with just about every rebel group… you were building things that weren’t solely for us.”

  “I was.”

  “Primordials played a part. Then and now.”

  “In a way.”

  I nodded.

  “Will you do me a favor, Sylvester?” Mary asked.

  I tilted my head to one side.

  “Stand where I can see you and them at the same time?”

  “I’m not a threat to you.”

  “Please,” she said.

  I crossed the room. I stood at the side, near the bookshelves. Torches and lanterns were lit throughout the Academy grounds. It looked like the Hag Nerve was being dealt with, and people were freer to move. Our people. I settled in where I stood, close to the skin suit.

  “Hayle… well, if he’s another god, he’d have to be another great force. You’re not going to have power and then power again,” Fray said.

  I shook my head.

  “It wouldn’t suit Hayle either way. Neither would Control, as a repeated thing. It would need to be something that could rattle you, once you settled on this course of action. And you have settled. You were telling the truth about that.”

  “I did. I was. I am.”

  “I have my guess,” Fray said.

  “You said you wanted what I wanted, out of Hayle,” Lillian said. “And I really just wanted answers. I wanted to ask why. I’m afraid of the answer. Maybe—maybe Sylvester is afraid of the answer too. Is that what you meant, Sy?”

  I wanted to respond to her use of my name. That would have to wait.

  “It is.”

  “The unknown,” Fray said. “You can’t wrap things up in Radham without asking the questions. Professor Hayle’s relative silence up until now may stem from a concern about how you respond to the answers.”

  “In part,” Hayle said.

  “The unknown.” I nodded. “That works.”

  “I’m quiet in part because this is a day I’ve seen coming for a very long time,” Professor Hayle said. “I’ve known you since the very beginning, Sylvester.”

  “Who was I?”

  “Who were you?”

  “On the Block?”

  “I couldn’t even tell you, Sylvester. It didn’t matter. I visited the Block, I walked down the row, talking to the Academy Doctors who had brought their quotas or looked after each of you. I browsed the paperwork, I made small talk with my peers. Tea was served, and we discussed the projects that their picks would be slated for. There was mention of a transplant of a child’s brain to the body of a specialized warbeast, they had their eye on one little girl with a vicious streak and a propensity for escape attempts for that.”

  “It’s horrible,” Lillian said.

  “If it makes you feel better, that one killed its creator,” Fray said.

  “That does make me feel better,” Lillian said. “But it’s minor, when I know so many others suffer.”

  “They did. They do. There were other Professors who wanted hale and hearty children for breeding programs, some who intended to test drugs that would alter how children grew, with an eye to gigantism and custom proportions. Most, however, wouldn’t tell me. It would show their hands before the bidding, you understand.”

  “And me?”

  It was the first of the dangerous questions that threatened to ruin us.

  “The son of a Doctor. He pricked his finger with a needle containing a patient’s blood. The blood was tainted from one of the weapons used in the war to the south. It was primed to take the life of a soldier, it took your father, and in a roundabout way, Sylvester, it took your family.”

  “I had a family?”

  “You had an older brother and three sisters. You might have been the youngest, but memory fails me here, it was a little over a decade ago that I read the pape
r, and I read it with an eye to anything that might qualify or disqualify you for what we had in mind. You had a mother and a father. Your father passed, your mother couldn’t look after you all. I suspect she was told you’d get a life of some sort, even if it wasn’t the one you’d been born to.”

  “A doctor’s son. Had things played out differently, if a man hadn’t pricked his finger, if a soldier hadn’t grown ill, I might have been a student.”

  “One who might have attended Radham, even, given the location of that Block.”

  I nodded.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Given the lack of a response, I wasn’t sure the voice had any ideas either.

  “It was my second visit that I met you, months after the one prior, where I escorted my students to the Block and met… you have a new name for them, now that they wear skirts and dresses.”

  “Jessie. But they weren’t Jessie then. They wouldn’t have been Jamie either.”

  “I remember them, too,” Hayle said.

  “I’d ask, but I think Jessie has had enough shadows of the past nipping at her heels.”

  “I’d always hoped it would be constructive, not destructive. Building them up.”

  If I hadn’t been in the picture, it might have.

  “We tried to revive Genevieve’s Prophetissima project, we erased her connection to it. The Yggdrasil-G project was a failure to thrive. Your predecessor, Ashton. The Wyvern project was an easy one to sell, when budget was a concern and criticism of my project. I made my visit to the Block, looking for my Wyvern. I remember looking at you, you were wearing a paper smock. You glared at me, Sylvester.”

  “I glared at you?”

  “It was important that you glared at me,” Hayle said. “Do you know Wollstone’s last law?”

  “I wasn’t aware they had a particular order,” Lillian said.

  “It’s not one of the ones you’ll find in the textbooks,” Hayle said. “Not a law that they teach students. It’s been passed on by word of mouth or rumor to anyone taking on a particularly ambitious project. Wollstone created the stitched and created the means for us to work out the scripts and patterns of living beings.”

  “He was killed by an advanced stitched of his, one with more memory and retention than the ones that preceded them. I’ve heard this.” I folded my arms.